To: Mani1 who wrote (55050 ) 4/9/1999 10:28:00 PM From: Process Boy Respond to
Mani - Thanks for the article. I like the last page.planetit.com So why, you ask, are virtually all the major operating system vendors, including Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Novell, Compaq and, of course, HP, porting their OS to IA-64? "It's simple," says McGhan. "No one wants to be left behind if IA-64 becomes really successful." He adds, "This may be just my twisted take on things, but I believe that the decision by all the major OS players to hedge their bets with an IA-64 port may have an unintended side effect -- it may greatly lessen the IA-64's appeal by reproducing on the IA-64 platform the RISC world's balkanization into rival OSes." Still, IA-64 retains considerable support among experts as the right way to go. Over at D.H. Brown Associates, Partridge sees no easy solutions to the mismatch between CPU and memory speed. But for him, as hardware strategies for wringing more performance out of faster chips has become ever more complex, the software strategy adopted by EPIC seems more promising than relying on hardware solutions. And while the delay in Merced's debut has radically changed the short-term prospects for IA-64, James Gruener, the managing director of Windows 2000 platforms for Aberdeen Group, believes that EPIC marks "an incredible turning point in how applications behave. EPIC changes the way the car works." Of course, HP and Intel have been tight-lipped about the details of the EPIC implementation. Says Eric Clow, technology marketing manager for HP's IA-64 program: "If you have looked around for information about HP compilers, you probably haven't found out much at all. We are all sworn to secrecy." But this is about to change. At the Intel Developers Forum in Palm Springs on Feb. 23, 1999, John Crawford and Jerry Huck presented more details of the new EPIC implementation. Further details and plans for IA-64 are slowly emerging, and more technical details are being released to developers. So stay tuned. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it may be "déjà vu all over again."
